When a new infectious disease enters a population it can create a pandemic in which a large number of individual in the population become infected with the disease. In part, the disease rate may be high because the subjects in the population have not had prior exposure to the new infectious agent. Recent pandemics include, for example, the world wide 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak, the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Western Africa, and the world wide HIV outbreak from the 1980's to present. During disease outbreaks some subjects in a population may develop immunity against the infectious disease while others do not and non-immune subjects may succumb to the disease.
Chimeric Antigen Receptors are human engineered receptors that may direct a T-cell to attack a target recognized by the CAR. For example, CAR T cell therapy has been shown to be effective at inducing complete responses against acute lymphoblastic leukemia and other B-cell-related malignancies and has been shown to be effective at achieving and sustaining remissions for refractory/relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukemia (Maude et al., NEJM, 371:1507, 2014). CARs include an antigen binding domain that is engineered into the man made receptor to target the CAR to an antigen of choice.
It is an object of the invention to use CAR constructs to find novel antigen binding domains for treating diseases such as cancer, infectious diseases, or aging-related conditions. It is also an object of the invention to make novel CARs using these novel antigen binding domains. It is an object of the invention to make novel antigen binding proteins that can be used as therapeutics against a disease.